Against Interpretation

Susan Sontag

From now to the end of consciousness, we are stuck with the task of defending art. We can only quarrel with one or another means of defense. Indeed, we have an obligation to overthrow any means of defending and justifying art which becomes particularly obtuse or onerous or insensitive to contemporary needs and practices.

This is the case, today, with the very idea of content itself. Whatever it may have been in the past, the idea of content is today mainly a hindrance, a nuisance, a subtle or not so subtle philistinism.

Despite being fascinated by Susan Sontag, I haven’t actually read much of her work, so it was inevitable that at some point I would end up with three...more

Across the Land and the Water

W.G. Sebald

Translator Iain Galbraith’s introduction is one of the best parts of this book, as it includes “an example … of the difficulty of translating Sebald’s poetry”:

Many of the poems in this volume—which opens with a train journey—reenact travel “across” various kinds of land and water (even if the latter is only the fluid of dreams). Indeed, several, as the writer’s archive reveals, were actually written “on the road,” penned on hotel stationery, menus, the backs of theatre programs, in cities that Sebald visited.

He goes on to talk about a poem titled “Somewhere” that involves a small town called Türkenfeld, which is an area Sebald would have passed through often, yet:

… it is well for a translator to

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All Things Glorious and True

Kat Asharya

I met Kat back in zine times, when people made friends through trades and letters, and those friends were often a combination of allies, collaborators, and maybe even the cool cousins you might not have had in your given family. As such I distinctly remember getting one of Kat’s zines and going to rent Breathless because she used stills from the film as background art — a quietly expansive moment in my film appreciation history. It was telling reading this collection of essays from Kat’s departed blog NOGOODFORME that I was familiar with most of the films she mentions either because I reflexively continued following her suggestions or I developed similar interests.

NOGOODFORME started as a fashion blog...more

Leaving the Atocha Station

Ben Lerner

If I was a poet, I had become one because poetry, more intensely than any other practice, could not evade its anachronism and marginality and so constituted a kind of acknowledgment of my own preposterousness, admitting my bad faith in good faith, so to speak. I could lie about my interest in the literary response to war because by making a mockery of the notion that literature could be commensurate with mass murder I was not defaming the victims of the latter, but the dilettantes of the former, rejecting the political claims repeatedly made by the so-called left for a poetry radical only in its unpopularity.

It’s clear early on that either the insufferably narcissistic poet that centers this story...more